A set of high quality colour images with Spanish norms for seven relevant psycholinguistic variables: The Nombela naming test

ABSTRACT

This paper presents a new corpus of 140 high quality colour images belonging to 14 subcategories and covering a range of naming difficulty. One hundred and six Spanish speakers named the items and provided data for several psycholinguistic variables: age of acquisition, familiarity, manipulability, name agreement, typicality and visual complexity. Furthermore, we also present lexical frequency data derived internet search hits. Apart from the large number of variables evaluated, these stimuli present an important advantage with respect to other comparable image corpora in so far as naming performance in healthy individuals is less prone to ceiling effect problems. Reliability and validity indexes showed that our items display similar psycholinguistic characteristics to those of other corpora. In sum, this set of ecologically valid stimuli provides a useful tool for scientists engaged in cognitive and neuroscience-based research.

Keywords:

• Ceiling effects
• Normative data
• Colour stimuli
• Nuisance variables
• Category-specific effects

Acknowledgments

We wish to thank Sara Cañamón for her help selecting and taking photographs of the items. We would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their very helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper.